The Strongest Brain in the Interstellar

The next few days were filled with the same monotonous shooting practice.

After all, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and even the most skilled marksmen or mech warriors need to build their skills through daily, gradual accumulation. Jiang Hui figured that they’d probably continue with this kind of static shooting practice until the end of training. For beginners, static shooting is the best foundation, even if it’s a bit dull in form. But it’s more stable in terms of effectiveness.

Honestly, she was eager to try shooting at moving targets, but with Nie Erqi not teaching them yet, there wasn’t much she could do. She would just have to wait until school started and practice in the simulation room.

However, amidst this ordinary, repetitive training, she began to notice a subtle change—an unusual feeling, perhaps. Or maybe she was just imagining things.

She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or if she was simply being self-centered, but it seemed… like the training environment had shifted.

How to put it? She felt as though she were standing out.

Her shooting accuracy was improving at a visibly rapid pace, to the point that sometimes her own precision shocked her.

While it was only with static targets for now, she had started to stand out noticeably among her fellow rookies. She was even beginning to draw attention.

The change in atmosphere wasn’t only because of the looks her classmates gave her—some admiring, some envious, and some filled with competitive spirit. It wasn’t even because of Clarens’s increasingly anxious gaze, one that seemed to regard her as a potential rival. Rather, it was the growing sense of pressure from the two instructors.

Alright, she knew that putting it like this might sound a bit like bragging. But to speak plainly, she wasn’t used to being the center of attention. In her brief twenty-odd years, she had always played a relatively ordinary role. After her parents passed away, there were even fewer people who had any expectations of her.

She had grown accustomed to blending in, wrapping herself in a thick shield of mediocrity to navigate through life unnoticed. She assumed this was how things would always be—who would have thought she’d get a second chance at life, and in a way that was so different from the life she once knew?

Now everything had changed. She found herself in an incredible future world filled with endless possibilities, with access to resources and opportunities far beyond anything she’d known before. Even in a society where talent often determined one’s resources, she’d started off with an unusually advantageous foundation.

This was a blessing left to her by her former self, and she was deeply grateful for it.

But after living as an ordinary person for so long, it was difficult to suddenly adjust to this new sense of being in the spotlight. It unsettled her, threw off her balance, and made it hard for her to focus on training. She felt at a loss, unsure of how to handle the change, and it had already begun to affect her mindset.

She figured… she might, perhaps, just need some time to adjust. Jiang Hui struggled to steady her mind as her thoughts ran wild, yet her hands remained steady, allowing her to fire off another accurate shot.

Behind her, she felt a sharp gaze intensify, making the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘Alright, big guy, are you feeling alright?’ While she didn’t fear this young person who meant no real harm, she certainly didn’t enjoy being treated as someone’s imagined rival.

Jiang Hui didn’t think this mindset—something close to paranoia—was a good thing. After all, wasn’t that the same attitude that got young Carl, who’d received a red card warning, expelled? The difference was that he had turned his twisted mentality into malice and acted on it.

‘Sigh’, this classmate Clarens is truly—arrogant to the extreme, unwilling to lower himself to anyone, no matter the situation. What he doesn’t realize is that there are no perfect people in this world. Those who chase perfection are often the ones who break the easiest, simply because they can’t accept their own flaws.

But this had nothing to do with her, and it wasn’t something she could concern herself with. Jiang Hui just didn’t want to unnecessarily create another enemy.

Jiang Hui decided to ignore it, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she moved to the back of the line for her next turn. What she didn’t see, though, was that her indifference and focused attitude only made Clarens even more unsettled, and his face took on a somewhat irritated expression.

This undercurrent—if you could call it that, since it was mostly one-sided—didn’t escape Nie Erqi’s watchful eye. He couldn’t help but find a bit of amusement in it.

Clarens’s prideful nature was clear. He was sharp and confident, but he did possess the skills to back it up. If properly honed, he had the makings of a natural leader. There were many of his kind among the stars in every generation: essential yet rare.

But the truly unusual one was that girl, Jiang Hui. She clearly had talent and an impressive steadiness, both in her shooting and her everyday demeanor. Normally, people with her level of capability might not be arrogant, but it’s rare to see someone who habitually dims their own light and sinks back into the crowd.

Nie Erqi felt she was an intriguing contradiction—lacking the youthful fierceness you’d expect, instead showing a rounded maturity shaped by life’s ups and downs. This tendency muted her own brilliance.

After observing her these past couple of days, Nie Erqi realized his initial judgment of Jiang Hui had probably been too modest. She wasn’t just a potential sharpshooter—she was, in essence, a natural-born hunter.

She had an exceptionally keen sensitivity to all changes in her surroundings, whether involving people or objects. This attitude set her apart from everyone else around her. Others seemed to view the exercises as just that—a series of trainings, activities that could shift without consequence or as a platform to enhance their abilities. But Jiang Hui approached each shot with absolute focus—each pull of the trigger was like a hunter going all in to take down prey.

She was fully absorbed in every shot, even though it came from a laser gun with a realistic appearance but zero real firepower. She became engrossed in the simple cycle of seeking a target, aiming, and pulling the trigger, working to make these steps ever smoother, almost ingraining them as memory within her muscles and bones.

This level of immersion and focus was exactly what made for an ideal “hunter.” Nie Erqi himself had only gradually come to understand this during his university years with his mentor’s guidance. But when had she, Jiang Hui, figured it out?

So, despite her lower consistency and cumulative accuracy compared to Clarens, Nie Erqi clearly had more faith in Jiang Hui’s potential.

As for Clarens, his nature was far from a hunter’s. He was better suited to other roles. This was a kid who’d likely had the best of everything growing up, who would view even small setbacks as sources of shame and hardship. Someone like that, without enough life experience, would be at a disadvantage in survival situations—perched high, looking down is easy; climbing upward, however, is hard.